Many setups. At least as many falls.Winter is paralyzing the country, but not here.Here, the boys are impersonating songs of indigenouswildlife. Mockingbird on the roof of the Gun Shop,scrub jay behind the Clear Lake Saloon.And when she darts into a drugstore for a chocolate-coveredalmond bar, sparrow hawks get the pictureand drive off in her car.Easy as 8th & Spring Street,a five-course meal the size of a dime.Easy as vistas admired only from great distance,explain away the mysteryand another thatched village is cluster-bombed.Everyone gets what he wants nowadays.Anything you can think of is probably true.And so, nothing. Heaven on earth. The ruseof answers. A couple-three-times around the blockand ignorance is no longer a good excuse.There were none. Only moodsarranged like magazines and bones, a Coke bottlefull of roses, the dark, rickety tables about the room.And whenever it happens, well, it’s whatever it takes,a personality that is not who you arebut a system of habitual reactions to anotherlight turning green, the free flow oftraffic at the center of the universe where shopsare always open and it’s a completesurprise each time you’re told that minding your own businesshas betrayed your best friend. But that’s over,that’s history, the kind of story that tends to have an ending,the code inside your haunted head.Easy as guilt. As waking and sleeping, sitting downto stand up, sitting down to go out walking,closing our eyes to see in the nocturnallight of day. “Treblinkawas a primitive but proficientproduction line of death,” says a former SS Untersharfurerto the black sharecropper-grandchild of slaverywho may never get overthe banality of where we look.Only two peoplesurvived the Warsaw uprising, and the onewhose eyes are paths inward, down into the soft grass,into his skeleton,who chain-smokes and drinks, is camera shy,wears short-sleeved shirts, manages to mumble,“If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.”